Rob Long (whose NPR segments appear as podcasts and who came to my attention on in BloggingHeads segment) was kind enough to respond to an email of mine asking, in pertinent part:

Your post today about resetting upfront compensation made me remember a question that's been in the back of my head for a while concerning the strike and the way writers are compensated: Does the WGA contract (the subject of the strike) set all terms of contractual relationship, or just those other than salary? Or does everyone operating under the contract get paid some form of scale such that every write in a given class makes the same amount and the there rules about the number of writes in each class that must be employed on a given project? Or perhaps something completely different?

The reason I ask is that if the answer is the first possibility, I don't understand why the studios don't just accept the WGA demands, but then lower salaries to make up for any expected lost revenue from internet revenue being shared with the writers?

His complete response is here, but the actual possible answers he gives are:

1.  That would be collusion, which is illegal, and the studios are scrupulously moral financial citizens.

(done laughing? I’ll continue…)

2. The studios — like the writers — all have different financial interests, too.  Sony and Paramount are mostly movie studios.  20th has huge web investments.  CBS is almost purely a television studio.  So aligning them all in one direction is pretty challenging, which is why they stick to what they can all agree on: no to everything, no to DVD residual increases, no to web revenue sharing, no, no, no.  

3.  Also: every concession they make to the writers carries with it an implied multiple of roughly 5.  Because they’ll have to give the directors the same (or better), and the actors, too, who get a little more because their residuals are split among cast members.  

So it’s easier just to say no, wait the writers out, get them good and broke.  And most of these guys aren’t great strategists — it’s hard to be, in a business driven by box-office and ratings. 

You see,  I’m not sure that in their multiple phone conversations, meetings, gatherings, etc. — and remember: these are all LEGAL conversations; the guild pretty much allows these guys to collude — that they’re not muttering about how great it would be if they all agreed to holding the line, when this is over, on fees and producer’s cuts and all of the compensation mentioned above, compensation that’s huge, agent (not WGA) negotiated, and compensation that is the source of competition between the studios.  Disney lowballs me on my producer’s fee?  I’ll go to 20th.  

But if Disney and 20th have decided, in the elevator, on the phone, in some non-discoverable venue, to cut those fees 30%, along with their other colleagues, it’ll probably stick.  Sure, in about a month after the strike, they’ll all be at each other’s throats again, competing and outbidding each other.

But for the first initial wave of hirings and renegotiations — when the writers are broke and need money — they’ll get their discount.  And they’ll reset the business.

Good stuff. I think 2 & 3 are probably good answers to my question (and provide and interesting glimpse at this business). I'm not persuaded that 1 is really a factor-- not because the studios are doing anything illegal, but rather because I think it is possible for the studios to legally communicate to one another in a rather generic way that they would reduce upfront fees to in response to an increase in residuals.

Megan McArdle writes "Compared to the netroots, right now, the rest of the political blogosphere is a demoralized and listless place. Libertarians are abandoning their mild preference in favor of Republicans, not for the Democrats, but for despair."

I recently lost the microSD card for my phone and was forced to turn to my backup: Orb. Orb has the virtue of being a nice platform for accessing content on your home PC from remote locations.

When I have hardwired connection and am using a PC it seems to work just fine for accessing my Media, although in that situation I will generally use J River's Media Center, so I don't have much experience with Orb.

Where I held out high hopes for Orb was in accessing media (mainly audio files) from my Windows Mobile HTC Mogul on Sprint's EVDO network. In theory, I should be able to ditch the time spent syncing files to a microSD card at home and instead just listen to whatever I want via Orb's web based application.

The problem in practice has been that connections tend to get dropped about every 15 minutes on average and they do not get reconnected. I don't know enough to allocate blame for this, but unfortunately this result has led me to use Orb only as a backup, when I would prefer to use it as my primary means of accessing audio files to listen to from on my phone.

Eric Posner has a good post on this subject, specifically with respect to put carbon into the atmosphere.

As I describe in a comment there is another good reason not to adopt such an allocation method: there are opportunity costs associated with setting up a regime that we have no good reason to believe would achieve any goal other one specific conception of equity. Generally put, there this would not necessarily improve the lot of humanity. More specifically, there is no reason to believe it would increase per capita  utility, personal autonomy or improve the chance of survival of the species in comparison with other potential systems for allocating rights. As his piece hints, there is a reason other resources are not allocated this way: there are better ways to do so.

Mark Cuban has another good post about Facebook. This one about different circles of friends.

It would be nice if Facebook made it easy to assign security settings to used defined categories and then assign those categories to different friends.

When we remodeled our house (completed about two years ago) we put in a bunch of X-10 switches and thermostats. The extra cost of about $2500 seemed like a reasonable expense in the context of a much larger project. Shortly thereafter I purchased HomeSeer home automation software and put it on our server.

In the course of that installation I discovered that installation of HomeSeer on Small Business Server is requires some effort, namely stopping IIS and setting Homeseer to run on port 81 (it uses a web based interface).

Last evening I discovered that in-application upgrades don't seem to work so well either. When I tried to update Homeseer, the update failed and I could no longer access Homeseer via its web interface (which meant I really couldn't access much at all.) The failure as reflected in the logs showed an inability to install the update. After several hours of experimentation, I was able to fix the probem by uninstalling HomeSeer and then reinstalling it. In fairness, I suspect use of HomeSeer on Windows 2003 is not officially supported so that they don't have to address issues like this one.

You can good sense for the power and flexibility of the application by looking at the extensive forums.

The two major home IT projects of the coming weeks are actually doing some HomeSeer programming and putting Microsoft XML tags on our family photos, both of which I've been putting off while I finished Mass Effect!

Quicktime for Windows has several annoying characteristics for those of us who prefer not to install iTunes: (i) everytime an update for Quicktime comes out it asks if you want to install iTunes as well (a request to ignore Quicktime plus iTunes is honored, but only until the next Quicktime update is released); (ii) it installs a shortcut on the desktop and the Quick Launch toolbar; (iii) it has a tendency to take over file associations from other applications (although less so in recent versions).

Apple is certainly within their rights to design their installer this way, but that doesn't make it any less annoying. The fact that Apple would like to make Quicktime a standard, just enhances this annoyance.

Does Microsoft do this with any of its Codecs? Just asking!

I see Megan McArdle likes my printer.

A common photography aphorism is that the best camera is one that you actually have with you. In other world a digital SLR that is bulky to take out of the house on most occasions is not as good a pocket sized point and shoot that you get in the habit of taking with you everywhere.

A post of the Audiophiliac about DVD-A and SACD mad me realize that this is true of media when it comes to methods of playback generally. People have so many more locations in which they consume/enjoy both audio and video media (multiple rooms of the house, the car, while walking or running, etc.) that they want formats that will work everywhere. For audio this is MP3, although car audio lags in this area. For video, the closest thing to the least common denominator is DVD, although this arguably true of MPEG2 as well. For photos this is JPEG. A similar point is made by a commenter.

This explains the limited adoption of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray and the ubiquity of digital cameras where almost any home device can now display JPEG format photos.

I suspect that the ability to access personal media over the Internet will eventually become a necessary feature of successful formats as well. Not only do people want to enjoy their media everywhere, they don't want the hassle of having to take it with them.

When the initial Xbox 360 Backwards compatibility list was released, one of the most mocked titles was Barbie Horse Adventures, i.e. why bother to make this lame game work with the Xbox 360?

Interestingly, Barbie Horse Adventures is now selling for well over the original retail price, and about $80 on half.com!